Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Death

Dave Weber
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Death — what a dark subject for a bright Sunday morning. Poets however love it and my favorite, Robert Frost, was no exception. I shall therefore borrow his wisdom and eloquence.

Nature’s first green is gold; her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf; so Eden sank to grief;
so dawn goes down to day; nothing gold can stay.” …

Nothing gold can stay … Everything living dies… So how do we confront this reality? We could complain — “Ah when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason, to go with the drift of things, to yield with a grace to reason, and bow and accept the end of a love or a season”. Yet we struggle on nonetheless as we “have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.” … Maybe that’s enough Frost for one morning.

When I was a teenager, I saw no ultimate purpose to living and like many thoughtful young people casually thought about suicide. Well I wasn’t really serious, but hey, life just seemed so meaningless. Death was an obsession in my early thinking. As a teenager, I wrote that my hope to “wash in the morning’s dew and hold the evening’s dying sunlight” was dashed by the cold and cruel reality of death, by the fact that someday “all that ever was will cease ever to have been”. Dark and depressing stuff, indeed!

However, that was long ago. This past Wednesday, I completed Amy’s class, “Creating Your own Theology”. Along with the other participants, I wrote a personal credo covering such topics as finding purpose and meaning, understanding ultimate reality, defining the nature of being human, and adopting ethical imperatives. Talk about power: I got to create my own bible! But it occurred to me that I never mentioned death in any of my writing. What had been such a powerful force in my youthful thinking was now apparently no longer of much import.

I realized that in youth, death is a shock — your comfortable world will change, your life will end along with the lives of all around you, and given enough time, humanity itself will eventually end. But with the passage of time, death became part of my worldview, and my own impending doom lost its horror. As I see it, you just go to sleep and never awaken. You are never aware of being dead — that’s a logical absurdity, so in a sense, you live forever. Dying can be ugly, but being dead isn’t all that bad. My metamorphosis with advancing age is hardly unique. Consider the movie “Harold and Maude” where Harold at 19 is obsessed by death while Maude at 80 is obsessed with life. This is not to say I will, to quote another poet, “go quietly into that good night”. My mother set a fine example for me — she loved life and fought like hell to stay alive as long as possible. But my own mortality no longer dominates my psyche. No, the sad part isn’t my own death — it’s the inevitable loss of those close to me. I am already an orphan. The generation that preceded me is gone and my friends and contemporaries are starting to disappear from the ranks of the living. I am tempted to reject close connection to others, as I don’t like memorial services. But I seek intimacy — it is part of the human condition to do so. Sadly, there can be no joy without pain. I will mourn many others until I am myself mourned … (hopefully).

At the end of Amy’s class we were asked to consider what gives meaning to our lives. I realized that if I lived forever, nothing would matter as I could always put off until tomorrow what I might do today. Mistakes and lost opportunities could always be rectified later and there would be no limit to the number of magical and mystical experiences ahead. Ho hum. I came to an incredible conclusion. What gives meaning to life is death. Admiring an incredible sunset, standing alone on a mountaintop, feeling the icy wind upon your face on a crisp morning, all these experiences and many more have special meaning because they are ephemeral, because each could be the last. What I seek in life is a full appreciation of each moment, the celebration of its special nuance, complexity, improbability, and beauty, with the full knowledge that it is unique and will never occur again. What seemed in youth to eliminate meaning now endows it. Will wonders never cease!

 

Sermon: A Party in the Graveyard by Rev. Eva Českava

    (Contact Rev. Českava for text of this sermon.)